Fat black gay man

In its upper stories, the Flex bathhouse in Cleveland feels like a squash club for backslapping businessmen. There's a large gym with free weights and exercise machines on the third floor. In the common area, on the main floor, men in towels lounge on couches and watch CNN on big-screen TV's. In the basement, the mood is different: the TV's are tuned to porn, and the dimly lighted hallways buzz with sexual energy. A naked black man reclines on a sling in a room called ''the dungeon play area. In small rooms nearby, some men are having sex.

Look Inside. Simon Doonan knows that when it comes to style, the gays are the chosen people. A second anthropological truth comes to him midway through a turkey burger with no bun, at an otherwise hetero barbecue: Do the straight people have any idea how many calories are in the guacamole? A Gucci-wearing Margaret Mead at heart, Doonan offers his own inimitable life experiences and uncanny insights into makes gay people driven to live every day feeling their best, and proves that they have just as much—and possibly better—wisdom, advice, and inspiration beyond the same old diet and exercise tips.

The United States is not a particularly thin nation, any more than it is a particularly honest one. Consider, for instance, that according to the Centers for Disease Control, about 70 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. And yet, at the very same time, notions of thinness are imposed upon us in such a way that overweight people are needlessly dying from stigma and cruelty. I take up space. From her perspective as a black woman and his as a black man, Gay and Laymon both lay bare many of the similar if distinctly gendered struggles of being large, black and considered too smart for their own good.

Request Exam or Desk Copy. To be fat in a thin-obsessed gay culture can be difficult. Despite affectionate in-group monikers for big gay men—chubs, bears, cubs—the anti-fat stigma that persists in American culture at large still haunts these individuals who often exist at the margins of gay communities. This book documents performances at club events and examines how participants use allusion and campy-queer behavior to reconfigure and reclaim their sullied body images, focusing on the numerous tensions of marginalization and dignity that big gay men experience and how they negotiate these tensions via their membership to a size-positive group.